Existing User

Modest beginnings of the cooperatively compiled collection of books for Dexter Sinister's The Serving Library, installed at Liveinyourhead, Geneva, as part of the exhibition and workshop ‘Re-Applied Art', 2010. Courtesy the artists

Dexter Sinister are a publishing concern. Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) are not artists, authors, critics, designers, editors, impresarios, journalists, philosophers, printers, publishers or snake-oil salesmen — unless they are all of the above at once: a publishing concern. That is, they are focused on publishing, as in the craft and manufacture and management of published pages, from writing to typeface to design to printing to publication to release to distribution to library deposit to mood to retrieval to use to archiving. Dexter Sinister make you note details. Their website is plain and text-heavy, with seemingly endless diversionary links taking you to other pages with more links. The now retired journal Dot Dot Dot entailed words aplenty, often words republished in slightly varied form. The advantage to being a publishing concern that works at every level of the process is that specifics are emphasised: how one issue has been designed; how one text has been generated, edited and distributed; how this one text has been edited and distributed the second time; how this one text slightly differs from its last publishing.

Here the exuberance for publishing and passion for distribution, unhampered by the logic and the strategy of business acumen, tumble over each other in the work. Keeping the path to publishing, that oft-unheard voice of editing and attention to typographic detail makes

Footnotes

This and all further section headings are from Bruce Russell, ‘Ten Aphorisms in Lieu of an Editorial Policy for Logopandocy’, Left-Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993—2009, Auckland: Clouds, 2009, p.19.
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For more on Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-Font, see Dexter Sinister’s ‘A Note on the Type’ in this issue, pp.28—35.
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A latter version of ‘A Note on the Type’ from Dot Dot Dot issue 20 quotes Michael Bracewell’s The Nineties (2002), Julie Burchill’s Made in Brighton (2007) and Alasdair Gray’s Old Men in Love (2007). The version published in this issue quotes three texts by Bruno Latour.
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Quoted in the exhibition plan document for Dexter Sinister, ‘The Plastic Arts’, Gallery 400, the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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I mentioned to Bailey that curator Bob Nickas had requested two songs by The Fall be played loudly before his talk at Gallery 400 in 2006. Bailey guessed he must have seen Nickas do this elsewhere, and that must be how he got the idea.
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Dexter Sinister, ‘Message-Signal-Noise-Channel’, 2008, statement to the curators, available at http://www.sinisterdexter.org/other.html?id=7 (last accessed on 30 January 2011). During the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Dexter Sinister occupied a hidden room at the off-site Armory location, releasing a series of parallel press releases and texts that commented on the Biennial, the history of the Whitney Museum of American Art and anything else that seemed appropriate for the moment.
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The Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore is the name of the Dexter Sinister office on the Lower East Side, where they work, stage events and sell books every Saturday. This location is soon to be closed, as Dexter Sinister turn to a new project, The Serving Library Company, Inc., which is presently set up as an online project until the physical project can be fully initiated. See http://www.servinglibrary.org/ or http://www.dextersinister.org/library.html?id=262 (last accessed on 30 January 2011)
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Journal

Events

Please join us to celebrate the launch of the Autumn/Winter 2013 issue of Afterall journal on Sunday 15 December 2013 at Dieter Roth's Bar in New York. Issue 34 features Lene Berg, Mary Ellen Carroll, Lili Dujourie, Haegue Yang and Lucy McKenzie, plus essays on social realism in the Philippines and Mike Kelley's 'The Uncanny' (1993/2004).